Beware: Should you happen to spot me on the streets of Westminster,
you are exhorted to summon law enforcement immediately! That London
borough's "Counter Terrorist Focus Desk" considers me a threat to
the public safety ("Anarchists should be reported, advises
Westminster anti-terror police," The Guardian, July 31).

Yes, I am an anarchist. I state this without apology, understanding
that you may find it strange or even scary, or may not understand the term well.
I'd like to explain myself to you, while there's still time, before someone else
tells you a scary story and urges you to assist in my apprehension.

I'm not a nihilist—someone who rejects all structure in, or
institutions of, society. Nor am I an agent of chaos, who believes that life
absent government would consist of ongoing, unrestrained mass rampage and wants
to see that happen.

In fact, I consider myself a defender of society and an agent of
order, opposed to the institution most responsible for the disintegration of
social institutions and the attendant orgy of looting, torture and mass murder
that was the 20th century: monopoly government, also known as "the state."

Why is it important to convey this to you at this moment in time?
Because the world's several states, as is their periodic wont, appear set to
launch a new round of "scares," with anarchists as bogeyman, to re-assign blame
for their own failures.

The Anarchist Scare never really dies out. It's a convenient hook on
which to hang the blame for any popular discontent. Look at any mass protest: If
a million people turn out to express dissent toward some government action, the
establishment media intently focuses on a few masked window-breakers to
discredit the whole affair, dubbing them "anarchists" whether they are or not.

And when things begin to get really bad—when multiple governments
find themselves flirting with default on "national debt," fighting and losing
numerous wars of aggression around the globe, and visibly losing their grip on
the putative "consent of the governed," for example—they break that masked, bomb-throwing
stereotype out of the Excuse Locker and parade it around the block in high
profile.

The unacceptable alternative to such theatre is for politicians to
accept full responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, and the
next time we see that happening will be the first time. So, prepare for the next
Anarchist Scare.

Why pick on anarchists? Why do politicians think you'll find us
scary? Because they find us scary, of course... and with good reason!

Political government is the past. Anarchy is the future.

"If a million people turn out to express
dissent toward some government action, the establishment media
intently focuses on a few masked window-breakers to discredit the
whole affair, dubbing them "anarchists" whether they are or not."

Political government brought you hundreds of millions of
murders in the last century, and sent you the butcher's
bill.

In any given month, a typical state kills more of its own
citizens pro rata than al Qaeda killed in the United States
on September 11th, 2001—some openly, bullet to brain; some
through the suffocating effects of regulation and
prohibition—while extorting from those same citizens a
double-digit percentage of their earnings for "protection"
from the likes of Osama bin Laden.

By any standard of human decency and wellbeing, the state's
performance constitutes not just massive failure but a
monstrous negation of all that is right and good.

While anarchists cannot reasonably pledge to end murder and
theft, we can and do offer an end to the
institutionalization and legitimization of mass murder and
theft in the name of "government." An end to, in a word,
politics.

Not an end to law, which existed before the state and will
exist long after the state is a mere bitter historical
memory. All societies outlaw murder, rape, assault and
robbery, and if societies vary in their effectiveness at
suppressing those activities, none has failed so
spectacularly or expensively as the state.

Nor an end to common defence, a notion the state turns on
its head and into a one-stop shop for aggressive capability
in its service and at the expense of that capability's own
providers. Local watchmen and constables, and citizen
militias, are transformed by the state into occupying,
militarized police forces and standing armies whose chief
purpose is to tyrannize the very people they're pledged to "defend."

Hobbes got it backward: The state offers not an end to "the
war of all against all," but the endless escalation of that
war, so that it can loot the dead and rob the dying in
perpetuity.

Anarchy is the ceasefire agreement. It's the peace craze
that the politicians desperately hope will blow over so they
can get back to their sociopathic, serial-killing ways.

Remember that a week, a month or a year from now when some
uniformed animal with a gun and badge tries to tell you that
I am the common enemy of you both.